Spenser – The RV Project

Time to Mourn

By SpenserEthics, MusingsNo Comments

I was an A’s fan. What happened? Fuck John Fisher, the spoiled bitch-boy son of the founders of the obsolete clothing store that charged $45 dollars for jeans all the way back in the 90s, The GAP. That’s what happened. My anger at one man’s greed, and a society that apparently allows rich assholes to shit all over everything (see: the 45th president), has finally overcome the irrational attachments that one has to their favorite things from childhood. My dad took me to games at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, and I took home souvenir cups with Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Dennis Eckersley, and Rickey Henderson on ’em. There was no Mt. Davis, and there was iceplant where much of the outfield bleachers would’ve otherwise been. One of my earliest memories is of the ’89 earthquake, which happened shortly before the A’s swept the Giants in the World Series. Last year, my brother and I scattered a small portion of our dad’s ashes in left field. In high school, my best friends and I would take BART to games all the time, despite often getting home late, and despite the summertime fog keeping temperatures in the 50s (but feeling much colder). We joyously celebrated the start of the Moneyball era, when blue-collar journeymen at the end of their careers, like John Jaha or Olmedo Saenz, could have a shot to be difference-makers and fan favorites. The bleacher fans were legendary, as were the signs and nicknames they created for the A’s…

May 11, 2023

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That Time The Mountain Called My Bluff

By SpenserClimbingNo Comments

I’m a boulderer, and unapologetically so. That said, I also like being on top of mountains. Sometimes, I go for long outings in the mountains that are hybrid hike/scrambles. I wrote about the WURL, Tenaya-Matthes-Cathedral, and Mt. Emerson, if you wanna read those trip reports. Previous scramble outings have always gone well for me. Weather has been generally good, routes uncluttered, and companions have been awesome without exception. And, most importantly, everyone has always gotten home safely. I knew it couldn’t go perfectly well forever, but I told myself that I would always be in control. I’ve never soloed anything I couldn’t downclimb, which meant that if I got off-route or got spooked, I could always bail by simply turning around. That had never been tested, until I decided to go for a stroll up the awesomely named Cloudripper. Most of my summer was spent recovering from an ankle injury, so I didn’t get to spend as much time in the mountains as I might’ve liked. I hiked up Mt. Tom (Winuba) and the ankle felt alright, so a couple of weeks later I decided to go for Cloudripper. I didn’t know much about it, except that it had a reputation as a fun scramble. A quick internet reading suggested that the obvious route was the West Chute, a 3rd-class romp on clean rock to a ridge just below the summit, with an easy walk off the north side of the mountain. The photos of dad-bods in New Balances told…

February 21, 2023

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Hello Again, World

By SpenserMusingsNo Comments

Hey World. It’s me, Spenser. Are you there? For the past 6 months, the days have been getting longer and the nights have been getting shorter, and all the while this blog has stayed the same length. The reason? Well, that’s complicated, but it’s in large part due to how much of a pain in the ass it was to put up a new blog post. You see, we weren’t satisfied with so many of the plug-and-play website themes, so we tried to customize things to our liking. This road leads to plugins and workarounds, and ultimately compatibility issues. The backend of RVproj.com probably resembles a hoarder’s basement. It got to a point where every time we wanted to post some writing, we’d have to spend half a day getting the PHPs and the SSLs to HTML the right CSS, and we had such a mess of bandaids on top of the wound that we never got around to excising the infection. OK OK, that’s horrible metaphor-craft, but I hope I’ve conveyed something about what a mess our WordPress-GoDaddy lovechild has become, attributable mostly to our utter lack of understanding in the realms of coding, hosting protocols, or really anything to do with this current iteration of the World Wide Web. I’m hoping to tackle that issue with an online course or two, but I’m also hoping that what we did this past week was enough to let us input words and images and publish them without as much drama…

June 21, 2022

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Something Not Terribly Difficult: A Stroll Up Mt. Emerson

By SpenserAdventure, ClimbingNo Comments

Mountain scrambling is rad. It’s also dangerous. The objective hazards-loose rock, weather–change the risk equation. By “not terribly difficult,” I’m referring to the experience in a very subjective way. Consider yourself disclaimed. I’ve dabbled in some big stuff before, but don’t consider myself an endurance athlete per se. I just think there are some awesome ways to link up features by traveling quickly in the mountains, like the Tuolumne Tenaya-Matthes-Cathedral day. My brother and I have done a couple of big ol’ hikes in Yosemite, one of which I’d be surprised if anyone else has done it (Curry Village to Mt. Hoffman via Cloud’s Rest, then back to Curry Village via Snow Creek). I proudly claim the slowest known time for a single push on Utah’s infamous WURL. And of course, hiking across the Sierras to go bouldering just sounds cool. I can’t say as I’m interested in endurance racing though. It’s more about sharing a special effort in special places with special people, or, if solo, it’s about the solitude. It’s not about slotting into a ranking of people doing the same thing. (Nothing against FKTs and all that jazz. I think it’s an awesome semi-formal competition that rewards creativity as much as athleticism. Part of the fun for me is not taking the time aspect too seriously.) Anyway, my FKT buddy Ryan Tetz (we did a video last year) and I had been talking during quarantine about getting out to do some mountains. For a Bishop resident, Mt….

July 18, 2021

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Something Pretty Hard: Hiking Across the Sierras for Bouldering

By SpenserAdventure, Bouldering, Climbing9 Comments

As seems to be typical, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. Frankly, it’s been a while since I wrote anything more consequential than an email. There are reasons I haven’t been writing. Most of them don’t really matter for our purposes here. The main reason is I hadn’t done much that I wanted to write about, and so the things I would write about would be stuff I haven’t done. And as I speed toward the milestone marking the end of my 37th year as a breathing, eating, shitting clump of cells, I find less and less satisfaction in knowing my pockets are full of mumbles (such are promises). So, the big news is, The RV Project is now headquartered in Bishop, CA. From 30’ monstrosity to 10’ wooden box to 12’ metal box to, finally, a 1972 A-frame with 2 bedrooms (go to tv bed store to buy a bed for yourself as if you were at the hotel) and 2 bathrooms. The trailer is now parked in our own driveway which recently was refinished with a driveway sealer, and there’s a garage for our stuff. Home improvement projects outnumber climbing projects 10:1 right now. If you are finding home renovation and repair a nightmare, why not look here to get quality repair services? Overall, we’re incredibly happy with the place, and with the concept of home ownership in general, but it’s bittersweet. We could afford this in part because my dad died, and I’m getting…

June 25, 2021

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Choppers, Choss, and Chaparral

By SpenserMusings, Trip JournalNo Comments

The last time we caught up was before Halloween 2020. Aye, it’s been about 4 months, in fact. Jeez. The RV Project has been regrouping. The past 12 months have been hard and weird for everyone, and the 10 months before that were pretty fucked up for us too. As far as I am aware, I’ve never had a proper concussion, but if I understand the symptoms correctly, then it would be fair to say that we’re recovering from something of a Traumatic Brain Period. We’re a little disoriented, we’re a little more irritable and quick-tempered, and we fatigue easily. Sensitive to bright light, too. After spending the better part of 2 years helping my parents navigate Life With Cancer (and a few months helping my mom embark on Life as a Widow), we now find ourselves in sunny San Diego, La Jolla to be precise. We’ve rented an apartment a few blocks from Vikki’s parents for a few months, so that we can help them navigate Life As Lonely Immigrants. Let me tell you something: Fuck La Jolla. Yeah, it’s expensive, but it’s not that. It’s the way people scoop up their dogs when they see Little Dude, because they don’t actually have dogs, they have Urban Accessories, and accessories don’t need to socialize. It’s the way that store clerks, especially California Bicycles in La Jolla, size up your wallet with a glance and decide if you’re worth a smile or not. It’s the straight-faced existence of businesses like…

February 24, 2021

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Fuck Cancer. I Miss My Dad.

By SpenserMusings10 Comments

My dad never taught me how to ride a bike. At about 12 years old, I learned how to ride a bike that my parents had gotten for my little brother’s 6th birthday. Riding bikes became a big part of my life fairly quickly, and if it weren’t for the fact that climbing has my heart, I’d probably be either a spandex-wearing slick-tire racer, or putting together epic bikepacking journeys. As it is, I recently picked up a more aggressive, full-suspension rig off of Craigslist, and mountain biking is beginning to compete for my time in a very serious way. My dad never taught me how to ride a bike because he didn’t know how to ride a bike. His parents wouldn’t allow him to learn. I ended up teaching him in 2011, because my friends and I had organized a Burning Man camp and invited the family along, and without a bike my dad would’ve been severely limited on the playa. Lately I’ve been lingering on the little idiosyncrasies that made my dad who he was, both as an individual and as a pater familias. I had always enjoyed saying “I taught my dad how to ride a bike,” because it’s a reversal of a common sentiment (ie fathers teaching sons how to do basic childhood things) that feels almost like wordplay. Nowadays, it reminds me of how toxic and oppressive my dad’s mother was, and how unpleasant it was to visit the grandparents, and how little it seemed…

October 25, 2020

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A New Video! Norman’s 13

By SpenserAdventure, Climbing, Stuff We're Psyched OnOne Comment

It’s been about 4 months since we last updated the blog. The pandemic was in its infancy, and Bishop was starting to get unpleasantly warm. Now it’s August, in this foul year of our Lord 2020, and trying to summarize the past quarter feels like a hopeless task. It’s also hard to concentrate on much of anything right now, thanks to the unbreathable atmosphere hanging over California. Times like these make you grateful for your friends, and at this moment in particular, I’m thankful my buddy Ryan Tetz for an excuse to update this space with some words and images that have nothing to do whatsoever with Covid19, the election, mass protests, or any of the other crap I’ve been dwelling on lately. Y’all might remember me talking about Ryan Tetz in the past. He’s an ER nurse, and was working at the ER in Bishop when I went in for a broken foot way back in ’12. We’ve been friends ever since. The last time I wrote about him here, he’d just pioneered a bike route across California (it took him about 27 1/2 hours to go from the ocean to Nevada). Since then, he’s bettered his record on the human-powered Badwater to Whitney (13 hours 16 minutes), done the first known triple-Sierra-crossing on a bike, set the record for all California 14ers human-powered, and a host of other very absurd challenges. Go check out his blog, where he introduces himself thusly: When I was 9 years old we…

August 26, 2020

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What I Love About COVID-19

By SpenserClimbing2 Comments

Kinda nothing, but at least I appreciate the novelty of this whole lockdown thing. We are the caged birds, finding our singing voices. We are training as if it’s only a matter of time before we’re either back on the rocks, or dead from Coronavirus, and we are going to be either fit as fuck, or dead but beautiful. Fifty (50) 3/8” bolts should arrive today, and the sun’s out. Escapism: it’s never been more important. This morning’s toilet reading included a few articles from the National Review, because I wished to know what the poly-syllabic conservative punditry thought about things. In an all-too-familiar manner, the Andrew McCarthy’s of the world are lashing out at the prognosticators. The push right now is to discredit (and direct vitriol toward) the IHME, because they had the temerity to attempt to model the outcomes of this pandemic, and because they have now twice revised the model’s results to predict fewer American deaths. Back in my science days, the battle between those attempting to sound the alarm over climate change and those attempting to discredit the entire concept of science was at its ugliest. There were hacked emails and snowballs in Congress, and all the while we kept destroying coral reefs and driving to work. If we just grow the economy, the Right said, then technology that we haven’t even dreamed of will rescue us…besides, they said, clutching their pearls on behalf of the poor, it would be unfair and even racist to try…

April 10, 2020

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How About a Climbing Update?

By SpenserClimbing, MusingsNo Comments

Ain’t no climbing! F’reals. The gyms are closed, Owens River Gorge is closed, the Happies and Sads are closed, and the Buttermilks are about to be. As I’ve said before, I’m on Team It-Don’t-Matter, since I’m also still on Team Rehab. I would never wish for good people to be prevented from climbing, but I am definitely benefiting from the absence of envy. I may not be doing Soulslinger this season, but neither will anyone else, haha! Talking to my parents, who are in quarantine in the Bay Area, it sounds like the public there is quite panicked, and very wary of each other. My mom tells me that people aren’t smiling at each other in the grocery store anymore; her observation is that those who choose to appear friendly these days are almost exclusively ethnic minorities. I can’t really comment on that aspect; around Bishop, people seem to be pretty friendly while keeping their distance. In the first 2 weeks of March, barely anything had changed at all in terms of folks’ behavior. The last 2 weeks we saw checkout queues with zones taped on the floor 6’ from one another, and Main Street has hardly any pedestrians at all. So, here in RV Project world, we are climbing on the trailer-woodie waaay more often than we ever thought we would. The weather this week is warm and sunny, and when there’s no wind, we can lower the wall without losing all of our important documents. In fact, when…

April 4, 2020

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